Yeah, at bare minimum Leslie has to have pointed Becky in the general direction of websites like Scarleteen and Planned Parenthood, and probably also educational webcomics like ‘Oh Joy, Sex Toy’, and ‘BOO! It’s Sex’. And probably a few more queer-specific resources as well.

Becky is so eager to make up for what she’s been denied in her upbringing that I could see her spending every waking hour she isn’t either with Dina and/or working reading everything on the sex ed sites.

I wasn’t raised religious and my parents aren’t prudes, but the majority of my detail-oriented sex education still came from the internet. So I don’t understand the idea that people won’t learn anything about healthy sex without a devoted class or long talk from their parents.

Especially given that googles ranking will give you pages first that match what you read elsewhere, so if you are raised evangelical, you’ll get bible thumper pages claiming all kinds of untrue stuff first.

😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂
That’s not how it works. You can try DuckDuckGo search to really confuse google about who the search is for.
But you still won’t get a good distinction between sites delivering trustworthy content and those who don’t. And it’s not always easy to spot what’s what.

13 years ago, a German IT magazine had a google ranking contest and invented the word “hommingberger gepardenforelle” for it. There are still a few convincing looking site around.

Also a lot of people who claim that women never want it, sex is a male interest only that they provide as reciprocation for romance, and thus little things like “whether they want it right now” is totally irrelevant. There’s lots of traps to blind googling.

I mean to be fair, sex-ed (even at non-religious schools) isn’t necessarily much better. Mine in the 90s was basically: “here’s how women get pregnant, if you have sex, you will get pregnant, also don’t use tampons or you will die.”

Becky was also seriously restricted in her internet access – remember when she first reappeared, she didn’t have a cell phone because Toedad didn’t let her have one. (And the strips while she was still at Anderson all have ‘Becky is using a cordless landline phone’ bolded in the understrip commentary now, it wasn’t taken from her or being tracked so she had to dump it.) Not surprising – one of the ways to isolate your abuse victim/presumed property is to keep them away from information.

I would strongly suspect they did have a computer or some sort in the house, especially with the homeschooling, but I’d bet Becky was only allowed it under supervision. I’m not even sure Bonnie would have been allowed unsupervised computer time given what a possessive dick Toedad is.

That said, I kind of think since UTIs are one of those things that happen, maybe Bonnie privately discussed them (in a ‘once you’re married and having sex sanctioned under the eyes of the Lord’ way) at some point? Like, during the Menstruation Talk, which I have to imagine Bonnie did give in some form and that Toedad likely considered her duty to discuss. It’s possible, at least. We know so terribly little about Bonnie, but she clearly wasn’t totally happy with the role she had to play and maybe that was a way to quietly give her daughter a little more important information?

If it wasn’t that, it was definitely Leslie and/or Dina sending her to Scarleteen and the like. If I’m remembering correctly Leslie actively has the ‘Young Newly Disowned Gay From Abusively Religious Background’ resources packs prepared.

I grew up with “sex is evil and you shouldn’t even think about it until you are married“. This resulted in very much shame (because YES, i DID think about sex (and not only think^^). Doing research was unthinkable when i was teenager/young adult, because i was lead to believe that knowing something about this would be sinful. If i had known half of what i know now about consent and sexuality, i’d have punched my first boyfriend in the guts early on and have spared myself a lot of trouble.
Thinking that my mum raised me that way in the belief that she was actually protecting me from getting hurt… seems very absurd to me, given the results. Getting hurt is what happens when you don’t get to approach something with the potential to learn more about it without being judged for it.

I think the most and best that parents / grown ups can give you while growing up is a healthy attitude towards sexuality – an attitude that’s open, not shaming or judgmental. And maybe a little critical towards questionable information.
If you grow up knowing that it’s perfectly alright to know about sex, you can do research for all the details you want to know, and learn to distinguish between good and bad information (or, also, are not ashamed to discuss it with people you trust to help sort it out).

At least that’s what i conclude from what i didn’t get and how much it still affects my sex life at 27 years old.

Becky, please never change. For all your faults, you offer solid advice about medical health after sex and for that, we thank you. Also you and Dina are an adorable couple, so there is that too I guess.

Day two. Dorothy and Walky formally broke up maybe twenty four hours before Amber kissed him. (There was a day before when they were on pause, but based off his reactions he clearly didn’t consider that the full breakup – all his crying was yesterday.)

“Dotty dumped you and so you slid into someone else’s direct messages”?

Yeah, that makes no sense as a sentence. How do you slide into private messages? I suppose that could be a reference to sexting, but… that’s not at all what they are doing. They are kissing in real life.
So yeah, I’m still confused.

Now, if she’d said “you slid into someone else’s inbox” I would be like “wow, dirty” because that is an obvious euphemism for vagina. But that only works because the word “inbox” in already dirty sounding. Direct Message does not sound dirty in the slightest. Private Message sounds dirtier because Private. Direct Message makes me think of the postal service.

Well, you’re free to not agree with the phrase, but it has become pretty widely accepted for when someone, instead of publicly flirting on some kind of social network, instead tries to flirt privately in the direct messages, instant messages, chat options available.
Though, I first heard it specifically when trying to get women to cheat on their significant others via said messaging options.

Ah! Thank you for explaining the context of the slang! Before this, all I could get was “direct message” without any explanation for what that meant. Using direct messages for clandestine relationships is the added implication that makes the phrase make… well, somewhat more sense anyway. It still seems a bit off to me since his relationship with Dorothy wasn’t clandestine, but ah well.
And no, I do not use twitter nor am I at all familiar with twitterisms.

This was never an issue in college for me because I always used the weird private toilet by the kitchenette rather than the public restroom.
That said, Becky is totes right. That post-sex pee is important.

The way the bathrooms in this dorm are set up, each pair of rooms has a shared toilet – Sarah and Joyce neighbor Sal’s room, which is how Joyce gets in there in the mornings when the main door is locked, and Amber and Dina neighbor Dorothy and Sierra. (This came up around when Dorothy figured out who AG was, for example.)

There might be public toilets on the floor for guests and stuff, but Dorothy wouldn’t know to use them and Walky coming out to use one post-sex risks blowing the secret just as much. And let’s be real here, because of the connecting doors there’s a risk Dorothy just decides to pop in and talk at the wrong time – I don’t think she and Amber have been able and willing to have a real conversation since the night of the stabbing.

The way the half-baths are set up in these dorms weirds me out more every time it comes up. You really just can’t lock them at all, can you? People can burst into your room at any moment and there’s nothing you can do. Nothing you can lock to keep them out.
Roommate’s gone for the day, you’re having sex and boom! Joyce wanders in.

Think I’d have a chair propped against that door anytime my roommate or I didn’t need to use the half-bath.

My dorm had a similar setup. You could lock them, but nobody ever did. Since we had tiny common rooms that connected to them people usually even left the door open as basically an open invite for the neighbors to come hang. They only got closed when someone took a shower

She was happy when danny got better after their relationship, so, she’s probably not. She will probably comment on it tough, I mean, do you want to see your partner with your kind-of-roommate literally two days after the breakup? I know I don’t. Especially not without being warned beforehand.

Walky on the other hand will probably feel pretty uncomfortable in that bath, he’s the one with a bad conscience.

Yes, as I said, she’ll comment on it. I don’t think anyone would be particularly thrilled about being replaced literally within hours.
Still, you can be hurt that you were replaced in a really short time (and with the same person your last partner replaced you with) and in the same time happy for your ex that he/she is better.
I’ve been there. Well, it was more time than two days, but it also was a much more serious relationship than theirs. I intended to drop everything and move 1.000km for him within the next year when things ended. A month or so later he found someone new.. someone who made him happier than I ever did. You go though an interesting mix of feelings. I could be so happy for him and hours later, I’d cry in my pillow or just scream at the sky. Fun times 😃 it even was me who ended it for rational reasons even though I still loved him, just like Dorothy. It wasn’t career-related though.
The thing is, even if you are happy for your ex that he’s better, your own feelings for him don’t magically vanish. It hurts to see someone take the place next to him you no longer can call your own.

Walky is trying to keep this whole thing secret for now, though, and it’s a pretty safe bet that one of the people he wants to hide it from is Dorothy. He obviously feels bad dating again less than 48 hours after the breakup and still has some feelings for her. (We know the former from right before the kissing started, when he said them dating this soon would make him feel terrible. We know the latter because of his expressions this strip, as pointed out by BBCC upthread.)

It could easily have been like a month’s worth of strips of Leslie asking about Becky’s prior knowledge and then explaining pamphlets and actually yeah we’d read that all, happily.

The problem is the comments would keep asking how anyone could believe that and know so little about anatomy and sex and we’d have to keep pointing out that whole time that the fundie bits are autobiographical, even allegedly secular sex ed in the US is dangerously useless, all of that is five hundred times worse if you’re a lady, much less gay, and that Becky had her media heavily restricted and didn’t have a cell phone until she took Robin’s so she couldn’t even do a private internet search. And I’m certain she couldn’t buy a puberty book at the mall because A: she might not have had access to her own pocket money, B: Becky probably wasn’t on her own at the mall that often, Joyce or someone would be around, so C: news would spread, and D: I don’t trust Toedad not to have periodically searched his daughter’s room for contraband. (C as a point exists solely to put the Toedad point with a horrified face. Augh I hate that dude.)

Something I never thought about before, how does the lock work on a shared bathroom? Does one lock lock both doors? Do you have to remember to lock both doors when you go in and unlock both when you leave?

Had a shared bathroom in college for a semester.
Our bathroom had 3 doors. 2 to the dorms, 1 to a semi-okay shower and toilet.
You could lock the dorm doors, like standard locks but the ‘facilities’ room had a shitty sliding door and even weaker latch.

Since they have communal showers, I assume that only the toilets are in a smaller space, with an open sink area.

The communal showers also have toilet stalls in them, and the shared half-baths apparently have a small sink and a toilet in what are, essentially, passageways between rooms. Not even privacy curtains.

I would guess both doors need locking? The building is from 1955, but I’m not certain if the half-bath situation was original (though I’d guess probably since otherwise they would have had to redo the floor plan) or what renovations have been done on that front. Big Ten school or not, automating the bathroom locks doesn’t seem like a cost-efficient plan.

The way it worked for me, there were locks on the dorm sides of the bathroom door, so you just locked it when you weren’t using the bathroom. Then you just had to knock before you had to use the restroom to make sure nobody was in there.

It doesn’t really seem to work either way. In that case, far too often someone wouldn’t remember to unlock the other door when they left, leaving the other side locked out of the bath.

Near as I can tell from the strip and for dramatic purposes, they simply don’t lock. People have walked in while others were using the bathroom, people have used it to get through to the other room at odd times. No one has ever found it locked.

My vague recollection is that, there being four logical configurations (inside, outside, both sides, neither) for the johnette locks, commenters have said they’d seen or actually dealt with every one. Weird.

Not a dorm so it might be different but, my brother and I grew up sharing a bathroom with 2 doors between our rooms, and when you share a bathroom with someone, you get pretty used to just knocking automatically before trying to open the door.

What’s more annoying is when the other person forgets to unlock your door so you have to go into their room to get into your own bathroom.

I never realised peeing after sex was a health thing, until a few months ago, when I read a bunch of tweets about it. It was just sort of a reflex.

Super-related: There aren’t enough superheroes with green costumes. I noticed Marvel tends to use it for villains, more often than good guys (DOOM, Scorpion, Loki, Doc Ock, Mandarin, Electro, etc.) This is clearly a conspiracy against the objectively best color.

It’s because green is hard to print with the old 4 colour system of printing that comics used to use (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) so they would limit the use of greens but also since they would largely have red, blue, and yellow main characters they would use purple, greens, and oranges because those contrastted in a pleasing manner against the bold primary colours of the main characters

There is considerable overlap in the locations of the urinary tract on both male and female genitals, and the locations of the primary sexual organs. You get a UTI when bacteria gets into the urinary tract and sex isn’t exactly the most sterile activity. Peeing after sex flushes the urinary tract out in case any bacteria has made its way in there during sex, reducing the chance of getting a UTI from sex.

And no, as far as I’m aware you can’t get a UTI from sharing a toilet seat. Unless you’re using it wrong.

Becky is referring to something else entirely…she’s talking about peeing to avoid UTIs, not claiming that peeing can transfer them. (Unless you’re peeing on your partner’s bits, which I suppose could do it.)

Fairly certain Pablo’s answer is a joke. ENII has the correct explanation. This probably refers to Twitter direct messages, as other sites usually call them PMs (private messages). And of course the characters have Twitter accounts, so it makes sense they’d reference Twitter.

I’m sure it will annoy and/or disappoint Bagge immensely that I won’t use this post to talk about Becky, considering she’s the star of today’s strip; but I just have to comment about the strip two days ago, in which Walky and Amber decides to just play video games and make out before class.

Because here’s the thing. We have discussed widely the topic of Walky not knowing how to study, and now he’s hitting the proverbial wall because of it. No need to repeat the details.

What we haven’t talked much about is that Amber also is not really spending much time studying. In between her raids and AG taking over to punch people, she doesn’t have that much time left over.

But unlike Walky, she still keeps getting good grades.

Now, part of this seems to be that she’s had a genuine interest in the things she’s majoring in; and as such, she’s basically studied many of those things before she got to college. In any case, how she maintains decent grades is not the real issue here.

The real issue is what is going to happen when Walky discovers that his new girlfriend is perfectly capable of slacking off and still acing her courses. That she’s not hitting the wall that he hit hard.

Now, I’m not saying he will be jealous of her or anything like that (he never begrudged Dorothy her grades). But I do think there is a decent chance that he will, once again, feel a great sense of inadequacy and not “deserving” his girlfriend.

That’s a good point. Walky feel that with Amber he can hide from his Terrible Truth… and in a very, very bad sense he can – she fixed his grades for him, after all. But the problem will still be there.

And Amber might face the same wall one day – at least if Alex starts making the classes more interesting than basic MS office usage (although it’s not as obvious for Amber because she has so much worse problems to deal with).

Amber’s going to hit the wall eventually, though, especially if she and Amazi-Girl can’t learn to get along and share their body properly. And like Dorothy, she’s probably going to react even worse than Walky, since she’s developed really terrible coping mechanisms.

Well, the thing about Amber is, she seems capable of knowing how to study to develop skills; which is a huge difference between her and Walky.

I say this because a) she probably spent a lot of time learning how to code. Learning to code is, no matter how you look at it, tedious work. Really tedious. The reason she’s ahead now is, I believe, because she essentially self-studied the subject.

In addition to this, we know that when she took her self-defense classes, she must have really excelled in them (otherwise she wouldn’t be able to develop AG in the first place). And physical excellence of the level she’s shown takes both practice and self-discipline to maintain.

I guess the short version of my argument is: Walky is a geek, but Amber seems a genuine nerd. So she’ll probably keep doing well enough.

Tedious? Hell no. My first attempt was frustrating (in a game with no debug information, it’d just crash and spit garbage at you if you did anything wrong) but after my second attempt (in a game that actually told you what line the problem happened at) I was hooked. It’s fucking addictive; the only thing that got me away from the computer back then was boys.
I’m pretty sure Amber feels the same way. 🙂

Wow, so amazing Becky, i get that you’re gay but its irritating that only gay stuff is deemed worthy of your attention. god, i dont hate you because you’re a lesbian, i just think its annoying that every time you open your mouth its like you’re being progressively ignorant. im glad that you found happiness, but if you’re trying to make friends then you shouldnt make them feel boring for being straight. I understand because i probably wouldnt care tooooo much about your lesbian escapades, but this just comes off as rude

But it’s the funny kind of rude, because it’s a complete reversal of the usual “straight people whining about too much gayness” (or men whining about female protagonists, or any privileged group whining about a non-privileged group getting representation). It’s refreshing to see it go the other way for once, even if it is a bit obnoxious. 🙂

When you’ve spent your entire life forcing yourself to invest in straight relationships and dynamics because that’s what’s “normal” it can come as an immense relief when you finally realize that you don’t actually have to and it’s okay to not find them relatable or interesting. Becky’s still riding the high of not having to pretend to be straight. Like, gods know by the time I came out I was so tired of having society shove straightness in my face at every turn.

Yep. Also when you live your life balancing being yourself against the very real risk of violence against you if you are visibly yourself in public, it gets wearing to see people Not have to do so. Even if you like those people!

And Becky would be particularly conscious of that risk given everything that happened with Toedad and then coming home and that community siding with him over her. (Hell, they sided with him over JOYCE, who he threatened with a gun because she didn’t want her best friend kidnapped.) Becky knows this risk is legitimate, she experienced it firsthand. She knows the ostracism that comes with it and leads to that threat of violence. And she is done with all that shit.

Yeah like I don’t even come from an especially repressive background beyond the general background radiation of heteronormative society so I can only imagine how much that feeling of relief intensifies by like an order of magnitude.

I doubt Becky was trying to be rude. She just wants to get in touch with a part of herself that she can finally be proud of, that she wants to enjoy openly. Plus, it’s just so Becky to be super blunt about it.

I think Becky is mostly ‘I really don’t care, straights gonna straight’, but the Dorothy concern in general is because he and Dorothy broke up less than 48 hours ago, and it is clearly still a concern with him.

You’re totally allowed to hook up after a breakup, but THIS SOON after a serious relationship (in Walky’s case, HIS FIRST) is gonna raise eyebrows and be awkward with the ex when you both still have some feelings for each other. It’s a level of Drama Potential so high even the characters in universe recognize it.